Guarantees a top 4 seed. We can have the 2nd best record behind SA, and be the 2nd seed. The other division winners are the 3 and 4.
They could start by retracting. Lop off 3 teams. No matter what you do, players are going to stack teams. This leaves a void in the rest of the league.
The last few years? Try 20. The last time the east was any good was when they had Jordan and Ewing playing there. Even then, there were alot of sketchy teams. The west has always been consistently stacked.
Earlier tonight, I saw the Celtics with a record of 7-11. They were a half game out of 1st place in their division. Ugh.
I wonder how they're gonna vote for all stars this year with all of these teams under .500. Can they have half Heat players and half Pacers, and then maybe one Hawk?
Don't be so conservative 13 out of 15 West team would be top 3 in the East. Ladies and Gentlemen, there are TWO, I mean exactly TWO teams in the east, that are having a winning record right now… This is absolutely ridiculous considering those team play again each other most of time (and a win has to end up to someone for those games you know.) I'm sure the 3rd worse team in the west by record, the 7-8 Pelicans, would achieve a better than 0.500 record and thus be the 3rd seed in the east.
I think the low bar has killed the conference. The Atlanta Hawks are the perfect example, you can field an extremely mediocre squad and not only make the playoffs, even advance in the east. Teams will make the playoffs and for some reason actually think that means they are ready to compete, so they try to make win now moves, when they really aren't close (see the 2012 Knicks) It's 15 years now, with no signs of changing, it's a trend not an isolated lull.
One of the key trends is poor management. There is no excuse for teams like Atlanta and Brooklyn to be at the bottom consistently. Its unfortunate that many of these teams are in the east. As I stated before, there needs to be a contraction.
While fewer teams may translate to each team having better players, it does not correspond that the remaining teams would be better managed or coached. If you were to cherry pick all the poorly run teams in the now, things would look better in the short term. But over time, we could end up with same percentage of bad ones. Perhaps if owners could be removed by the league in the case of pitiful performance over a period of years, this could bolster things :grin:
A contraction is not going to help anything competitively. There will always be bad bad teams, a contraction isn't going to fix that. I think Sealclubber is right about the low bar. A way to immediately fix that is to just put the 16 best teams in the playoffs and get rid of conferences.
The best team in the division would probably be the 2nd (or third) worst team in the Western Conference hahahahahaha.
For the first time this season, all the teams in the SW division were .500 or better. I couldn't resist, excuse my paint skillz. [img=http://s30.postimg.org/5007g822l/Screen_Shot_2013_12_01_at_9.jpg]
